


Willful

by tastewithouttalent



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Angst, Injury, M/M, Making Out, Mutual Pining, No Plot/Plotless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:40:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27782383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tastewithouttalent/pseuds/tastewithouttalent
Summary: "Tezuka isn’t listening for a visitor, doesn’t have the attention to spare for anything outside of the agony radiating pain out from his shoulder; and so it is only as the door squeaks open that he is given too-late warning." Tezuka has an unexpected visitor and finds a moment for surrender.
Relationships: Fuji Shuusuke/Tezuka Kunimitsu
Kudos: 19





	Willful

Tezuka doesn’t hear the footsteps approaching.

He would, in other circumstances. Generally he is constantly aware of the other members of Seigaku, with some part of his attention always turned over to tracking the exuberance of Kikumaru’s movements and the constant murmur of Inui’s commentary and the ever-improving skill of Echizen’s play. And during practice he knows how to keep himself restrained, to fix his expression to distant attention and not let his gaze linger too long on any one person or any particular match. But in other circumstances he would be surrounded by the club members who follow him with a dedication that leaves no space for his own human weakness; in other circumstances he wouldn’t be here at all, alone in the dark of the locker room after a too-long solo practice with nothing but the rasp of his pained breathing for company. He isn’t listening for a visitor, doesn’t have the attention to spare for anything outside of the agony radiating pain out from his shoulder; and so it is only as the door squeaks open that he is given too-late warning.

The light comes on at once, blossoming out from the fixture overhead while Tezuka is still lifting his head, while his fingers are still seizing to cage his shoulder as if he might be able to restrain the pain as well as the motion. The illumination pours over him, casting his position hunched at the far end of the bench into clear relief before he can so much as straighten the defensive curl of his shoulders, and when Tezuka’s attention comes up it is to look directly into the startled gaze of the last and only person he wants to see right now.

Fuji is standing silhouetted in the doorway, the light haloing his body against the shadows of night that have fallen over the world outside. One hand is still at the handle of the door, the other outstretched from reaching to switch on the light; he is frozen in tableau by his own surprise, eyes open wide so Tezuka can see the clear blue of them from across the space of the locker room between them.

“Tezuka,” Fuji says. Even his voice is showing signs of his shock; it rings loud into the quiet of the locker room, murmuring a fading echo against Tezuka’s ears like the chime of a bell falling into breathless silence. Fuji blinks, lashes marking out the boundary of the first moment of surprise, and Tezuka can see his expression pull back into reserve, can see the start of his usual polite smile form the foundation of the wall that usually exists between them. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were in here.”

Tezuka’s heart is racing, his throat too tight on panic and pain together for him to find voice. He needs to speak, he knows, has to find the shape of an explanation that Fuji will never ask for; and then Fuji blinks again, his attention dips to the bloodless white of Tezuka’s knuckles clutching at his shoulder, and Tezuka’s speeding heart drops into freefall as Fuji’s polite smile disintegrates from his face.

“Oh,” Fuji breathes, a single sound of understanding too certain for Tezuka to hope to dodge it; and then his gaze leaps back to Tezuka’s face, his attention crystallizing into the razor-edge of too-clear perception. “What’s wrong?”

Tezuka shakes his head, knowing even as he does that the effort is futile, that this is a battle that demands all his spent strength if he is to have any hope of diverting Fuji’s insight. “Nothing,” he says, and forces himself to sit upright, to straighten the line of his back and drop his shoulders back even as the motion wrenches agony through him and flexes his fingers so hard he can feel his nails digging bruises into his skin right through his shirt. “I’m fine.”

“You’re hurt” and Fuji is striding forward, leaving the door to the locker room to clatter shut behind him as he approaches, a hand outstretched over the distance between them. Tezuka recoils, flinching from the possibility of Fuji’s touch at his shoulder, and Fuji halts as instantly as if he had shouted a command. There is a moment of relief, a breath of painful hope as Tezuka retrieves some fragment of control over the situation again; and then he lifts his gaze, and he sees the way Fuji is looking at him, and he knows any control has long since slipped from his desperate hold.

Fuji is staring at Tezuka’s shoulder, his gaze gripping at the other with as much intent force as Tezuka’s own hold, where his fingers are trembling with a strength he is unable to lessen. Fuji’s face is white, the color stripped from beneath his skin and pressed to bloodless pale by the set of his lips against each other; the only hue still remaining is in his eyes, a bright, brilliant blue that Tezuka would cringe from if he weren’t so captured by it.

“Tezuka,” Fuji breathes, shock and horror mingling on an exhale as pained as if Tezuka had slammed a blow into his chest. He stares at Tezuka’s fingers, his gaze piercing past the cage of the other’s grip and the weight of his shirt down to the core of pain, the dull throb of an endless ache that only grows by the day, no matter what Tezuka does to soothe it. They are still for a moment, Fuji staring at Tezuka’s shoulder and Tezuka gazing at Fuji’s face; and then Fuji’s eyes comes up to grip Tezuka’s with unshakeable strength.

“How long?” he asks, and his voice is soft as a dying breath, delicate like the fine-honed edge of a scalpel.

Tezuka jerks his head into negation, forces his hand to loosen from its hold and fall to his lap. “I have it under control.”

Fuji’s lips press together, his chin tips up. “How  _ long_, Tezuka.”

Tezuka gazes up at Fuji, feeling the tension on Fuji’s voice like a blade kissing the line of his throat. Then he shuts his eyes, and bows his head, and breathes out an exhale of surrender. “Months.”

Fuji gusts a sharp, shocked exhale. “You’ve been practicing through it?”

Tezuka jerks his head, a rejection of the idea of stopping more than the truth of Fuji’s words. “We have the tournament coming up. I have to face Hyotei.” He blinks hard, feeling his shoulders tighten with the necessity of a familiar burden. “I’m Seigaku’s pillar of sup—”

The blow is so sudden that Tezuka doesn’t feel the pain of it for the first moment. It’s just an impact, sharp and stunning as it cracks against his cheek and forces his head to the side. His mouth comes open, the breath knocked from his lungs in the first shock, and a voice follows, snapping with as much force as the slap that has just connected with Tezuka’s cheek.

“How  _ dare _ you.” Tezuka’s face blossoms into heat, burning out to radiate across his cheek a moment before the pain rushes in to fill the space of it. He blinks and lifts his head, raising his gaze back to look at Fuji standing directly in front of him.

Fuji is incandescent. Tezuka has the advantage of height when he’s on his feet, though they’re rarely near enough to each other for him to take note of it; but now Fuji is looming over him, his usually gentle appearance cast aside like the façade Tezuka has always known it to be. His face is still white, paled by rage out of even its usual faint flush, but his eyes are brilliant, crackling electric with the energy of his loosed temper. His hands are at his sides, his fingers relaxed without the fists Tezuka might expect in someone else, but with his shoulders back and his chin lifted he looks like an angel with divine retribution coruscating through every fiber of his being.

“How dare you,” Fuji says again, speaking with a softness that slices the deeper for the near-whisper of his voice. “You  _ know _ what will happen if you keep playing on an injury and you’ve still continued without telling  _ anyone_.”

Tezuka works his throat on the effort of a swallow. “Coach—”

“Without telling  _ me_,” Fuji clarifies, slicing clean as a blade through Tezuka’s protest. “You might ruin all your chances of playing tennis and you made that decision  _ alone_?” His gaze bears icy judgment down on Tezuka sitting before him. “You can’t support Seigaku if you  _ break_.”

Tezuka stares up at Fuji. It would be easier to look away, perhaps, to shut his eyes and let the blow of the other’s judgment fall unseen, but he is no more capable of turning aside from the vision of Fuji’s rage now than he has been any other time that he has seen it, and the fact that Fuji has nothing to distract him from seeing Tezuka’s rapt focus does nothing at all to give him the strength to turn aside. All he can do is look, as defenseless before the radiant beauty of Fuji’s fury as he is to the truth of the other’s words as Fuji pins him beneath the blue ice of his glare.

“Seigaku needs you as a  _ captain_,” Fuji tells him. “We need you to play.  _ I _ need you to play.” When he takes a breath Tezuka can hear it catch on the strain in his throat, can see a heartbeat of pain flicker across Fuji’s expression before he wrenches himself back into focus. “Everything is ruined if we lose you.”

Tezuka works his throat on a swallow. His head is spinning, his thoughts skidding away from his control. He should look away, he has to turn his head and shut his eyes and escape from the intensity of Fuji’s blue stare; and he can’t, his strength is evaporating and he can’t find so much as a wish that it might remain. He has been so strong for so long, has braced himself in his composure and built armor from his self-restraint; and in this moment, with pain aching along his shoulder and through his chest, all Tezuka can find beneath his reaching hands is weakness that urges him towards the relief of surrender.

For a moment they gaze at each other, the air heavy with the weight of years-old silence. Then Tezuka shuts his eyes, and draws a breath, and lets his words fall free from the prison of his too-tight throat. “Why?”

He hears the exhale on Fuji’s lips, the surprise of an unlooked-for relief from the burden they have both carried too long. Fuji’s inhale sounds like surrender, soft and aching with the pull of winter-hardened earth giving way to springtime thaw, and when he speaks the sound of his voice slides past all Tezuka’s armor with the ease of a blade striking home.

“I need you.” Fuji rasps a breath and continues on, the words running snowmelt-fast as they spill past his lips. “I need you to play me, Tezuka.”

Tezuka lets that linger for a moment, lets the ache of relief sag the tension from his shoulders and soothe the constant burden of restraint from his body. Then he lifts his chin, turning his face up towards the light before he opens his eyes to meet Fuji’s gaze.

The ice is gone. Fuji’s anger is still visible, still trembling hurt at his mouth and brilliant in the color of his gaze; but there is no barrier between them, not the distance of judgment or the cool of composure or the show of restraint. Fuji’s eyes are open, their clear blue fixed full on Tezuka’s face, and as Tezuka meets the other’s gaze he feels himself falling, dropping over into the collapse he willingly stepped into the moment he parted his lips on his question. His body flushes, heat cascading through him with a wholly different kind of strain, and when he moves it is to lift his hand, to reach up and out even before he has pushed to surge to his feet. His fingers find Fuji’s hair, his hand completing a motion long years in the forming, and as Fuji’s lashes fall on anticipation Tezuka’s head is bowing in answer, his mouth soft and lips parted even before they find the surrender of Fuji’s beneath them.

There is no thought. Tezuka’s body is acting on its own, surging forward into the space crafted by all the moments he failed to act, by all the breathless anticipations he has fought back. His palm curves against the back of Fuji’s head, his fingers gentle and his hold certain, and beneath his lips Fuji’s mouth is opening into the ready welcome of instinct. Fuji’s tongue presses to Tezuka’s lips, dipping into his mouth to reach for intimacy, and when Tezuka turns his head Fuji’s hand grips at the back of his neck to hold him still as Fuji lays claim to his lips and mouth and tongue. Their bodies press together, fitting to align at chest and hip and thigh, and when heat hums the sweet of vibration across Tezuka’s tongue he doesn’t know if it is his own moan or Fuji’s he’s tasting. There is no line between them, no distinction between the work of Fuji’s tongue or the pressing force of Tezuka’s lips, and for a long span of indulgence all Tezuka knows is the heat of Fuji, hands and body and mouth all making good on a claim too many months denied.

Tezuka doesn’t know what might happen were he uninjured, were the strength of his body equal to the force of his desire. His fingers are buried in Fuji’s hair, his shoulders tipping in to meet the backwards curve of Fuji’s body, his tongue working desperate heat within Fuji’s mouth. But when Fuji shifts himself closer, when Fuji’s hand presses to the dip of Tezuka’s back, reflex reaches out to make a claim Tezuka’s body can’t sustain. Tezuka’s left hand rises, lifting from his side to fit his fingers to Fuji’s shoulder, hip, thigh; and the jolt of pain that ricochets through his shoulder tears through the cascade of desire to stifle his motion unfinished. Tezuka jerks back, his throat catching a gasp of pain even as his lips throb with the friction of Fuji’s upon them, and Fuji goes still against him, his hands still holding Tezuka against his body but the persuasion of his seduction halted by the sudden spasm of the other’s agony.

They are both still for a moment like that, bodies pressed together, breath rasping hard upon the other’s parted lips. Tezuka can taste Fuji at his lips, on his tongue, thrumming fire through the whole length of his body; and just as brightly he can feel the sharp pain of his shoulder, a knife to cut through even the searing burn of desire. He stays still, trapped between the competing demands of body and mind, frozen by his own undoing; and Fuji sighs against his mouth, and his hand at Tezuka’s back loosens and falls away.

“Not like this,” he breathes, apology and curse at once, and Tezuka has to shut his eyes as Fuji pulls away from him, extricating the lithe grace of his body from its perfect fit to Tezuka’s own. His fingers at Tezuka’s neck linger longest, his touch tracing idly along the back of the other’s collar; and then that draws away too, and Tezuka lets his own hand fall to set Fuji free as the other steps back. They are silent for a moment, their voices fallen still in the first reforming of the space between them; and then Fuji shudders an exhale, and shuts his eyes, and turns aside.

Tezuka doesn’t watch him go. He keeps his gaze forward, keeps his hands still at his side as he listens to the sound of Fuji’s footsteps pacing across the locker room floor, as the door squeaks open to the other’s pull. It’s only as it swings shut again that Tezuka lets the tension in his shoulders give way with temptation out of his reach once more. He lifts his hand to his shoulder to cradle the throb of pain thudding in lockstep with his heartbeat, and he bows his head, and he lets the ache of his self-inflicted pain rise to overtake him.


End file.
